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Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK
jarich writes "According to this news article, Google may be preparing to offer free Voice Over IP telephone service in the UK.
This sounds related to a previous Slashdot article about Google starting to buy dark fiber.
So what are they planning? A free service like Skype (computer to computer only) or more along the lines of Lingo or Vonage?"
You can also call a regular phone with Skype. It's not free, but you can do it.
Someone left a bracket on there, so..., 00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1454225
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
For when the article gets slashdotted -
Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT
By Elizabeth Judge, Telecoms Correspondent
GOOGLE revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with our phones.
The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer.
The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it.
BT, which connects seven out of ten British households, has developed its own internet-telephone service. However, the telephone giant, which has the most to lose if the new technology takes off, has been reluctant to promote it heavily.
Julian Hewitt, senior partner at Ovum, a telecoms consultancy, said: "From a telecoms perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation -- and of course the Google brand is a huge draw."
Mr Hewitt said that a Google telephone service could be made to link with the Google search engine, which already conducts half of all internet inquiries made around the world. A surfer looking for a clothes retailer could simply find the web site and click on the screen to speak to the shop.
The basic cost of making calls across the internet is almost nil. The real cost is in developing the software; after that, the service exploits available internet capacity. However, charging does become necessary to link internet calls with the traditional phone network.
In addition, the sound quality of calls across the internet can be poor and the connections can be less reliable.
A recent job advert by Google's on its website calls for a "strategic negotiator" to help the company to provide a "global backbone network" -- a high-capacity international infrastructure.
By investing in capacity, Google could circumvent the problems of quality and reliability and guarantee better service.
Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, the logical use of such a network would be to help to support a new telephone service. The company would buy capacity cheaply, by taking up slack capacity left behind when the internet bubble collapsed in 2001.
Around the world, thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable remain unused because the amount of speculative development vastly exceeded demand. Such capacity would be available at rock-bottom prices today.
Elsewhere in the world, using the internet to make phone calls has caught on more quickly. In Japan 10 per cent of households already use the so-called "voice over internet protocol" and an internet service offered by Softband has 4.4 million subscribers. Its growth has depressed revenues of the local telecom group, NTT.
In the US, a company called Vonage offers customers unlimited calls each month for as little as $24 (less than £13).
Big companies and multinationals that make huge numbers of long-distance calls are also increasingly switching to internet calls to try to slash their bills.
Google, which was founded in 1996, built its business from scratch by offering a fast, reliable and free internet search. It gradually transformed into a highly profitable company by offering commercial services, including sponsored web links.
Its most up-to-date figures show that, in the first nine months of 2004, Google made a profit of $195 million on revenues of $2.1 billion.
START OF THE BIG SEARCH
# Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page began working on Google's search-engine technology in 1996 when they were in their early twenties
# They tried to find a buyer for their work but were forced to set up their own company in 1998 because nobody was interested
# Two years later Google became the bigg
I think it would be interesting to have ads while a call is being connected (i.e. ringing). It seems like they could pipe audio ads down the wire during the inevitable pause while the system tries to track down a cell phone, or the long distance call is being routed...
There's already a few places that have services like that in place. In Ottawa, Canada, there's a service called CHUM Total Free Call. You dial a number, connect to their server, and they play an ad for you. At the end of the ad, you're given a dialtone and told to enter the phone number you wish to call. The benefit is that you can call anyone within the local area code at no cost. It's particularly beneficial in the rural areas that have some strange local and long distance zones.
I'm not sure how well they're doing, though, since some of the ads made very little sense. There was one for an ISP that provided service for a monthly fee of $2.95 CAD. I can't imagine they were paying very much for the airtime given that price. However, with Google's repetoire of sponsors, they could probably do quite well for themselves.
In TFA "a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer." So they would surely display ads while you're making the call. Even conceivably targetted from speech recognition, but that's a long shot and likely to spook people.
In the UK the Yahoo messenger has BT communicator software embedded, which can make free net to net Voip calls, but also has access to a net to POTS gateway and vice versa, any costs are billed back to your home phone number automaticaly. But the basic net to net service is free.
see http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/